Alumni, future students, and members of the public are welcome to join us for final reviews. Daniels Faculty students in architecture, landscape, and urban design will present their final projects to their instructors, as well as guest critics from the professional community and local and international academic institutions. 

This semester the Daniels Building is closed to the public, because of COVID-19. As a result, all reviews will be held online, on Zoom. If you'd like to attend, all you have to do is pre-register on Eventbrite and you'll receive login instructions for Daniels On Air.

We welcome our alumni/members of the professional community tuning in to this year’s reviews. Although we won’t be able to greet you personally, please do let us know if you plan to attend the online reviews by confirming your name/affiliation with jacqueline.raaflaub@daniels.utoronto.ca. Your continued engagement with the Daniels Faculty and its talented students is appreciated by us all.

Register for Graduate Reviews on Eventbrite now

Register for Undergraduate Reviews on Eventbrite now

See our Daniels Reviews Online - Instructions

Follow UofTDaniels on Twitter and Instagram and join the conversation using the hashtag #DanielsReviews. All reviews take place from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. (unless otherwise stated). Please note that the times and dates of the review schedule may change.

Monday, December 14 | Undergraduate

Drawing and Representation I ARC100H1F
Instructors: James Macgillivray, Genevieve Simms, Fiona Lim Tung, Daniel Briker, Chloe Town, Danielle Whitley, David Verbeek, Kearon Roy Taylor, Nicolas Barrette, Scott Norsworthy, Anne Ma, Tom Ngo, Nuria Montblanch, Andrea Rodriguez Fos, Kara Verbeek, Luke Duross, Jamie Lipson

Tuesday, December 15 | Undergraduate

Drawing and Representation II ARC200H1F
Instructors: Michael Piper, Francesco Martire, Leon Lai, Simon Rabyniuk, Sam Ghantous, Katy Chey, Samuel Dufaux, Mohammed Soroor, Monica Hutton

Design Studio II: How to design almost nothing
ARC201H1F Instructors: Miles Gertler, Jennifer Kudlats, Aleris Rodgers, Brian O'Brian

Wednesday, December 16 | Undergraduate

Architecture Studio III ARC361Y1F
Instructors: Petros Babasikas, Anne-Marie Armstrong, Adrian Phiffer

Landscape Architecture Studio III ARC363Y1F
Instructors: Behnaz Assadi

Technology Studio III ARC380Y1F
Instructors: Nicholas Hoban, Nathan Bishop

Thursday, December 17 | Undergraduate

Senior Seminar in History and Theory ARC456H1F
Instructors: Jeannie Kim

Senior Seminar in Design (Research) ARC461H1F
Instructors: Jeannie Kim

Senior Seminar in Technology (Research) ARC486H1F
Instructors: Nicholas Hoban

Friday, December 18 | Undergraduate

Senior Seminar in History and Theory (Research) ARC456H1F
Instructors: Jeannie Kim

Senior Seminar in Design (Research) ARC461H1F
Instructors: Jeannie Kim

Senior Seminar in Technology (Research) ARC486H1F
Instructors: Nicholas Hoban

Friday, December 11 | Graduate

Design Studio I ARC1011YF
Instructors: Vivian Lee, Tei Carpenter, Miles Gertler, Sam Ghanthous, Aleris Rodgers, Carol Moukheiber, Maria Denegri

Design Studio I (The Language of Landscape) LAN1011YF 
Instructors: Behnaz Assadi, Peter North, Elnaz Sanati

Monday, December 14 | Graduate

Design Studio III (Integrated Urbanism Studio) ARC2013YF / LAN2013YF / URD1011YF
Coordinators: Fadi Masoud, Mason White, Michael Piper
academic.daniels.utoronto.ca/urbanism

Tuesday, December 15 | Graduate

Architectural Design Studio: Research I ARC3020YF

(L9101) Redeployable Architecture for Health—Pop-up Hospitals for Covid-19
Instructor: Stephen Verderber

(L9103) STUFF 
Instructor: Laura Miller

(L9105) ARCHITECTURE ♥ MEDIA
Instructors: Lara Lesmes, Fredrik Hellberg

(L9106) Designing Buildings with Complex Programs on Constrained Urban Sites that include Heritage Structures
Instructor: George Baird

Design Studio Option LAN3016YF: Toronto Ravines—CREATURE
Instructor: Alissa North

Design Studio Option LAN3016YF: Our Plant Relations and Decolonizing Design
Instructor: Sheila Boudreau

Wednesday, December 16 | Graduate

Architectural Design Studio: Research I ARC3020YF

(L9107) What is Inclusive Architecture (Landscape Architecture, Urban Design)?
Instructor: Elisa Silva

(L9108) The Usual Suspects 
Instructors: Filipe Magalhaes, Ahmed Belkhodja, Ana Luisa Soares

(L9109) Towards Half: Climate Positive Design in the GTHA
Instructor: Kelly Doran

(L9110) Anthropocene and Herd
Instructor: Gilles Saucier, Christian Joakim, Gregory Neudorf

Design Studio Option LAN3016YF: Our Plant Relations and Decolonizing Design
Instructor: Sheila Boudreau

Design Studio Option LAN3016YF:  Mediated Reconstructions: Developing a historiographic design method in landscape
Instructor: Aisling O'Carroll

Design Studio III URD2013YF
Instructors: Angus Laurie, Mariana Leguia

Thursday, December 17 | Graduate

Architectural Design Studio VII: Thesis ARC4018YF
Instructors: Adrian Phiffer, Petros Babasikas, Laura Miller, Robert Levit, John Shnier, Michael Piper, Mauricio Quiros Pacheco, Carol Moukheiber

Friday, December 18 | Graduate

Architectural Design Studio VII: Thesis ARC4018YF
Instructors: Adrian Phiffer, Petros Babasikas, Laura Miller, Robert Levit, John Shnier, Michael Piper, Mauricio Quiros Pacheco, Carol Moukheiber

Post-Professional Thesis I ALA4021YF (12:00-4:00 pm)
Instructors: Mason White (Coordinator), Adrian Phiffer, Maria Yablonina, Carol Moukheiber, Jesse LeCavalier

Photo by Harry Choi.

A project by associate professor Jesse LeCavalier has made the shortlist in a competition to envision an ambitious future for Sudbury, Ontario.

Le Cavalier's project is one of eight finalists in Sudbury 2050, a design competition initiated by the McEwen School of Architecture, at Laurentian University. The competition brief called upon entrants to create proposals for a complete overhaul of Sudbury's city centre, keeping in mind the city's setting amidst the forests of Northern Ontario, its history as a mining town, and its future as a hub for research and development. The jury includes Marianne McKenna, of KPMB Architects, and Bruce Mau, of Bruce Mau Studio.

LeCavalier titled his design "Alimentary Urbanism" — a name meant to suggest a style of redevelopment that places residents and their wellbeing ahead of financial profits. The core of the proposal is a pair of new rail spurs that connect the existing Sudbury VIA Rail station with the downtown GOVA transit hub and the nearby Elm Place shopping centre. These new spurs would become the centrepiece of a new network of rail lines that would provide rapid transit, community programming, and other services to neighbourhoods throughout the city centre.

As a way of leveraging all this new rail, Alimentary Urbanism proposes transforming Sudbury's former mining sites into locations for new industries, like agriculture, cold storage, and geotourism. The proposal also calls for substantial new land development. The city would conduct a survey of its existing building stock and decommission obsolete structures so that the space they occupy could be repurposed for collective uses. The businesses that occupy those old buildings would be incentivized to move their operations into modern mass-timber structures alongside the new rail corridors.

The project was developed with assistance from Jake Rosenwald, Connor Stevens, Jennifer Tran, Siqi Wang, and Michael Wideman.

To learn more about Alimentary Urbanism and the other Sudbury 2050 finalists, visit the Sudbury 2050 website.

Top image: A slide from the Alimentary Urbanism master plan.

A recent Globe and Mail feature about backyard office spaces is a cornucopia of Daniels Faculty connections.

The article opens with an anecdote about Daniels Faculty professor Mason White and his partner, University of Waterloo professor Lola Shepherd. The pair commissioned a backyard office from macroSPACE, a practice cofounded by Daniels Faculty assistant professor Maria Denegri.

Vicky Mochama writes:

Mason White and Lola Shepherd considered briefly moving out to a farm in Ontario’s Prince Edward County. “I lost that argument,” Mr. White says.

Instead, the Toronto family commissioned a “macroSPACE” unit from the modular building designers of the same name; a pre-fabricated one-room structure to sit in their backyard. With one teenager tackling high school from home, another arriving home early from COVID-shortened school days and the parents – both professors – teaching from the house, space in their house became a precious commodity. The house sits on a skinny lot in Toronto’s Bloorcourt neighbourhood; adding to the main house itself would have been prohibitively expensive.

What they get instead is a room of one’s own – a place that suits the needs of all the family members. The elder teenager gets a place to play video games; the younger a space to exercise. Both children have a space to hang out with friends and the parents get a quiet space to finish work, or read.

Read the rest of the article on the Globe's website.

Statement from the Dean's Office

Earlier today, President Gertler made a University-wide announcement about an important change in the start date for winter term. This shift is intended to support the U of T community's health and wellness during an unprecedented time. 

I understand how difficult this year has been for so many in our Daniels Faculty community, and I want to assure you the wellbeing of students, faculty, and staff remains our highest priority. That is why winter break will be extended by one week for all Daniels undergraduate and graduate students.

The new start date for Daniels Faculty winter 2021 undergraduate and graduate classes is January 11.

This extra time will allow us to regroup and refresh before our next term begins. As a reminder, all winter 2021 classes, labs, and tutorials will be conducted online.

Reading week dates will remain the same (February 15-19), and any previously scheduled field courses will continue remotely during that time as planned. Classes will end on April 9; final exams and reviews will be completed by April 30.

While our classes will start on January 11, the University will still be reopening on January 4. President Gertler also announced three additional paid days off for staff, to be taken individually or as a block. At the Daniels Faculty, only essential staff-related meetings are to occur during the week of January 4–January 8. Managers will meet with staff to discuss how we can organize this time to provide as much of a break as possible during this week.

We will share more information about what to expect next term very soon. The Daniels Faculty COVID-19 FAQs will be updated to reflect new information on an ongoing basis, as will the UTogether website.

For now, I want to reinforce how important it is to strike a balance between work and the other aspects of our lives. If you ever feel that it's impossible to find that balance, remember that we are here to support you. Ask for help, and you will receive it.

On November 19, the Daniels Faculty is hosting Architecture in Dialogue, an online symposium to celebrate the 14th cycle of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. But even once the symposium ends, it will still be possible to learn about the award's latest crop of honourees in an engaging way. That's because the Daniels Faculty has created a new Architecture in Dialogue website, to educate the public about the award and its impact on the design fields.

The Aga Khan Award for Architecture is given every three years by the Aga Khan Development Network. The recipients are projects in the fields of architecture, landscape, planning, and historic preservation that address the needs of societies with significant Muslim populations.

The Aga Khan Award was first given in 1980, but it has struggled to gain prominence in the western hemisphere. "Although this award has existed for decades, the winning projects are not well known to North Americans, particularly students of architecture, landscape, and urbanism, who could learn from their examples," says Daniels Faculty professor Brigitte Shim, who is a member of the award's steering committee. "Taken individually and seen together, these works provide remarkable precedents for tackling global challenges."

The Daniels Faculty's symposium, and the accompanying website, are intended to help bring the award's latest winners to the attention of Canadian and American architects, academics, and students.

The new website, designed by sessional lecturer Andrew Bako and Nikolas McGlashan (MArch 21), includes information about the award competition in general. It also contains a wealth of details on the winners of the award's 14th cycle, which concluded in 2019.

The 2019 winners include the Alioune Diop University Teaching and Research Unit, a Senegalese educational facility designed by the Spanish architecture firm IDOM. The building expertly references local architecture while incorporating modern sustainability features like passive cooling and wastewater filtration.

Another highlight among 2019's winners is the Palestinian Museum, designed by Heneghan Peng Architects, of Ireland. The structure, located in the West Bank town of Birzeit, takes inspiration from the rough-hewn agricultural terraces that surround it.

For more information on those and other winners of the 14th cycle of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, visit the Architecture in Dialogue website.

Take me to the Architecture in Dialogue website

Web design by Andrew Bako and Nikolas McGlashan, with thanks to Jeanie Lim (Shim-Sutcliffe Architects) and the Daniels Faculty exhibition committee.

Jason Nguyen, an assistant professor at the Daniels Faculty who specializes in architectural history, has published an essay in the fall 2020 edition of Journal 18, a journal of 18th-century art and culture. Nguyen's topic is the surprisingly numerous connections between early modern British cartography, colonialism, and the emergence of the British commercial class.

Early in his essay, Nguyen identifies a particular object that, he argues, embodies these intersecting trends: a "pocket globe," produced by the British cartographer Herman Moll in 1719. The papier-mâché and plaster globe, seven centimetres in diameter, depicts the world as Britons understood it at the time — complete with inaccuracies (California is drawn as an island, and half of Australia is missing) and a bright red line that charts the travels of William Dampier, an English explorer and pirate who was famous for having circumnavigated the world three times.

Nguyen writes:

The cost of an average pocket globe placed it out of reach for the everyday laborer but within the budgets of London’s emergent middling classes. During the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, England witnessed extraordinary growth in luxury consumption by individuals from different social and economic backgrounds. The amount and variety of goods found in the average home increased dramatically, specifically in the case of small decorative objects. The composition and compactness of Moll’s pocket globes speak to the profound transformations in global finance and domestic consumerism at the turn of the eighteenth century. As miniaturizations of the world, replete with Dampier’s nautical journeys, they depicted the maritime infrastructure that generated European wealth. At the same time, their size presumed a portability and conspicuousness that catered to a population fascinated by the novelty of small decorative commodities. As such, they are unique lenses through which to examine the relationship between cartography, consumerism, and the burgeoning structures of global capitalism — along with their attendant connections to colonialism, the stock exchange, and slavery.

Journal 18 is open access, meaning the full text of Nguyen's essay is free to read online.

Take me to Journal 18

Top image: A map from Herman Moll's The World Described. Image from the British Museum.

Anyone searching for King William Street, a major dining and entertainment strip in Hamilton, Ontario, will soon have a new landmark to navigate by. Make Studio — a design-build practice led by sessional lecturer Dina Sarhane, Daniels alumnus Mani Mani (MArch 2010), and Tom Svilans, a designer and researcher at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen — has won a competition to build a tall, functional piece of public art at the street's eastern terminus.

Make Studio was announced as the winner of Hamilton's King William Street Beacon and Gate Public Art Project competition on October 16. The studio's winning design, titled "Wood Gate," consists of a series of custom wood glulam arms, arranged to resemble a tall tree that has been splintered, as if by lightning. ("Glulam" is short for glued laminated timber, a durable engineered wood product.) The design is intended to complement the surrounding urban streetscape while symbolizing Hamilton's transition from a manufacturing town to an arts and hospitality hub.

The eight-metre-tall structure satisfies the "beacon" part of the city's design brief, and it also acts as concealment for a utilitarian element: an internal pulley system allows one of the glulam arms to be lowered to street level, so it can serve as a barricade to vehicle traffic during pedestrian-focused public events. (That's the "gate.")

Make Studio's proposal was one of six to make the city's shortlist. The competition jury, in its public report, praised Wood Gate for the way its design "creates a welcome connection to nature, speaks to evolution and growth and brings a unique warmth to the street."

Wood Gate is scheduled to be installed during summer 2021. "We are thrilled that municipalities are welcoming the use of wood in our public spaces," Sarhane says. "We are advocates for the use of wood in the public realm because we see the material choice as sustainable, local and inviting. It is a humble and tactile material that is readily available in our country. With advances in digital fabrication, it can be transformed into infinite possibilities."

The Wood Gate design includes a number of innovative touches, starting with the wood itself. Make Studio will be using yellow cedar to create a custom, free-form glulam material designed to resist weather and wear. Recessed within the glulam arms will be strips of high-intensity LED lights. The lights will serve a dual purpose: they'll illuminate the beacon with white light and also serve as a warning system, by flashing red when the barricade is being lowered.

The design also includes a public bench, which will be installed on the other side of King William Street, opposite the beacon. The bench will double as a locking mechanism for the barricade, and will also conceal a storage area for the barricade's pulley handle and "road closure" sign.

Designing and building public works projects out of engineered wood is a specialty of Make Studio, which was founded by Sarhane and Mani in 2016. (Sarhane is also the founder of DS Studio, a separate architecture and urban design practice.) The studio's other recent projects include "Turtle Tower," a beacon-like wooden public sculpture that resembles an elongated turtle shell, now under construction in Kelowna, British Columbia. And Make is currently at work on developing a system of wooden playground equipment for public use.

In a normal year, one of the highlights of the semester for instructors and undergraduate students in Architecture Studio III (ARC361) is midterms, when students present elaborate physical models that creatively reinterpret a famous home somewhere in the world. This year, with everyone studying from home, that collective experience couldn't happen. But studio coordinator Petros Babasikas and studio instructors Anne-Marie Armstrong and Adrian Phiffer still found a way to replicate some of the creative joy of in-person presentations: they had students make videos.

Each ARC361 student made a model using whatever physical or digital materials were available to them at home, and then used that model as the basis for a short film. The goal of each was film was to give the viewer a sense of what it would be like to be inside the model. "Students tried to get a point of view and tell a story through that," Babasikas says. "We also talked about genre, and whether there was suspense in the films they made."

Students proved so adept at creating architectural drama in their short films that Babasikas is planning to make video a permanent part of ARC361's syllabus, even after the pandemic ends. "We usually represent architectural design as finished, vacant drawings and images. But architecture is never finished and always occupied: it's a time-based process, creating atmosphere and stories," Babasikas says. "Filmmaking is just a natural next part of this process. It is very close to the premise of the studio, which is about architecture and domesticity. Working between model-making and filmmaking, the students have produced design fictions."

Here's a look at a few videos from the studio.

Hazel Gao, "I Wish I Were a Flying Whale..."

Hazel took on the Eames House, by Charles and Ray Eames. The home is now a museum, its interior still packed with the Eames's ultra-stylish furniture and personal possessions. Hazel chose those household objects as the focus of her video exploration. "She made physical models, very carefully and delicately, of all these domestic pieces," Babasikas says. "And she started setting up different domestic arrangements. Each one is very dramatic, as if something has just happened there. And then there's this character, a whale, which is a prominent piece of Indigenous artwork in the Eames House and Office. She animates this whale and has it fly through and connect these different domestic interiors."

Carissa Tzeng, "The Wanderers of the Void"

Carissa's video is a reinterpretation of Manuel Aires Mateus's House in Leiria, a home that is distinguished by a large central void. "She built a model of that void, and then she started inhabiting it," Babasikas says. "It's no longer the void of a house. It's a kind of transparent space that she lights, and then she starts populating it with these characters that appear and disappear, like ghosts."

Yuhan Zhang, "BREATH"

Yuhan studied Lina Bo Bardi's Glass House, in Sao Paolo. To capture some of the original home's transparency, she made a model out of parallel plexiglas sheets. The video shows the sheets being added and removed in stop motion, which gives the viewer a feeling moving through the house's interior. Midway through the video, Yuhan submerges the model in water and uses pigment to create a strange, atmospheric effect.

Nezar Alkujok, "Through the Window"

Nezar reinterpreted Edwin Lutyens' Orchards, an Arts and Crafts home located in the English countryside. His video takes elements from the original house — windows, a vaulted ceiling, a loggia — and recombines them to tell a story.

Eric Wang, "Overlapping"

Eric's precedent was Pezo von Ellrichshausen's Poli House, a residence and cultural centre located in Chile that looks, from a distance, like an unfinished concrete shell. Eric's video shows off an alternate-reality version of the house that consists of a series of sliding, overlapping planes.

Soroush Ehsani-Yeganeh, "The Study of a Precedent — Casa Gaspar (1992)"

Soroush studied Alberto Campo Baeza's Casa Gaspar, a modern courtyard house in Spain. In Soroush's video, the property becomes a planetoid where the laws of physics and geometry don't apply. By the end of the video, the house seems to become the focal point of an alternate universe.

Chenxi Cai, "Moriyama House Revisited"

Chenxi's video is based on SANAA's Moriyama House, an experimental housing complex in Tokyo that is characterized by square volumes and a modular, multi-unit arrangement. "She built a model of certain axes, certain voids, and certain spaces in the Moriyama House," Babasikas says. "You get views that penetrate across the block. And then she started repopulating the interior. What's really interesting is the way she creates weightlessness. There are a lot of people floating in intermediary spaces."

Melody Ekbatani, "SUPERYAMA"

Melody's video places a version of SANAA's Moriyama House inside an arcade-style crane game. The arm of the crane traverses the property, dropping people and objects as it goes.

Professor Richard Sommer, who was dean of the Daniels Faculty before the conclusion of his term last summer, has co-authored a story for the latest issue of Cabinet, a Brooklyn-based arts and culture magazine.

The piece, which Sommer wrote in collaboration with Natalie Fizer, of Pillow Culture, is titled Glossary of Dream Architecture. It consists of a series of capsule essays about words and concepts that guided the creation of New Circadia, the immersive, cavelike installation that Sommer and Pillow Culture staged in the Daniels Building's Architecture and Design Gallery in late 2019.

New Circadia consisted of a dimly lit, felt-lined space suffused with soft, calming sound. Visitors were invited to linger, rest, and lose track of time.

Sommer and Fizer write:

The glossary gathers buildings, landscapes, events, films, stories, drawings, and other projects that can also be understood to constitute a makeshift history of dream design. Its contents are organized under the following headings: Air, Bricolage, Cave, Cloister, Glass, Grotto, Model, Mountain Aerie, Phantasmagoria, Stone, Temple, Test Bed, Vehicle, and Water. The history the glossary imputes is provisional to our own purposes and guides our ideas about how architecture models time to shape a space of dreams through the measuring, marking, and bounding of various human practices. The dream-inducing architecture of New Circadia begins with a search for tempos within the various and overlapping versions of time we inhabit. These include, but are not limited to: geological/deep time, mechanical/industrial time, wasted/idling time, broken/discontinuous time, organic/biological time, and mythical/story time.

Read the full glossary on the Cabinet website.

Take me to Cabinet magazine

Top image: Inside New Circadia. Photograph by Bob Gundu.

The Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture — better known as ACADIA — has been hosting annual conferences for almost as long as personal computers have existed. This year's edition, which begins on October 24, is exceptional for two reasons: one, it's going to be taking place entirely online, and two, one of the event's co-chairs is a Daniels Faculty assistant professor, Maria Yablonina.

Yablonina, whose area of expertise is computational design and digital fabrication, joined the Daniels Faculty earlier this year after several years at the Institute for Computational Design and Construction, in Stuttgart. She's a member of ACADIA's board of directors.

ACADIA had originally planned to hold this year's 40th-annual conference at the University of Pennsylvania — but, when the pandemic made that impossible, Maria banded together with a few other members of the ACADIA board (Viola Ago, Matias del Campo, Shelby Elizabeth Doyle, Adam Marcus, and Brian Slocum) to develop an alternative plan.

Transforming the conference into a fully digital event required the co-chairs to rethink some of the basic elements of a professional gathering. The conference's title, "Distributed Proximities," hints at some of the changes that needed to be made. For starters, all of the lectures, workshops, and presentations will (obviously) be taking place on Zoom. But the adjustments didn't end there.

"We've made quite a few changes to the traditional format of the conference," Yablonina says. "One of the big changes that I'm really looking forward to is that we've rethought the whole format of the keynote. Traditionally you would have a single person talking about their work, which in our feeling is a very egocentric format. So we've replaced that with conversations. Every single keynote will have anywhere from two to five participants."

Among this year's keynotes will be "A Conversation on Ecology and Ethics," with Jennifer Gabrys, chair in media, culture, and environment at the University of Cambridge's department of sociology. Gabrys will be sharing a virtual stage with Molly Wright Steenson, the K&L Gates associate professor of ethics and computational technologies at Carnegie Mellon. "The keynote event will feature a presentation of work from both participants as well as a conversation between these two incredible scholars," Yablonina says.

Another keynote, titled "On Data and Bias," will be a discussion between Ruha Benjamin, an associate professor of African American studies at Princeton; Orit Halpern, an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia; and David Benjamin, an associate professor at Columbia GSAPP. The three will talk about the way computation relates to our assumptions about race and gender.

"With this year’s conference lineup we are aiming to extend the range of conversations by speakers from a broad range of fields beyond architecture," Yablonina says. ”For every keynote panel there is an architect as part of the conversation or in the role of respondent. Through this pairing we are hoping to initiate a dialogue about larger societal implications of technology in design."

And the Daniels Faculty will have some representation at the conference. Assistant professor Mitchell Akiyama will be holding a workshop on October 24 and 25 in which he'll be leading participants through a series of guided writing exercises using "Under the Dog Star," a website he created for that purpose. John Nguyen, a student of assistant professor Brady Peters, will be presenting a paper about computational fluid dynamics in building design. Yablonina herself will be presenting a paper, titled "Designing [with] Machines," about the development of task-specific and site-specific robotic systems for architectural purposes.

Pre-registration is required to attend to the ACADIA Distributed Proximities conference. Students can register for free, thanks to support from Autodesk, an ACADIA sponsor. For everyone else, admission starts at $125.

Take me to the Distributed Proximities registration page